As the tasks computing systems are required to perform increase in complexity, the burdens on the central processing unit (CPU), the size of the system memory, and the traffic on the system address and data buses all correspondingly increase. In particular, many types of tasks associated with speech synthesis, image signal processing, and digital signal processing require repetitive performance of basic computing operations in order to treat the data stored in memory. For example, many times it becomes necessary to search through a set organized data occupying a substantial amount of memory. In conventional systems, such a search can take up valuable CPU time, increase the traffic on the system data and address buses, and generally reduce operating efficiency.